Abstract

For most literary sociologists serious modern work starts with Robert Escarpit’s Sociologie de la Littérature , a book which proposes that sociology can usefully explain how literature operates as a social institution. Subsequent Escarpit-inspired work on the literary enterprise covers topics such as the profession of authorship; the stratified “circuits” of production, distribution, and consumption; and the commodity aspect of literature. Critics have objected that Escarpit’s increasingly macroquantitative and statistics-bound procedures bleach out literary and ideological texture. And his model of literature as discrete social system encourages the abstract model making which Raymond Williams despises.1 But, whatever its shortomcings, Escarpit’s definition of literary product and practice as social faits forms an essential starting point for the sociologist intending to investigate the apparatuses of literature.In what follows, I shall mainly fix on a problem currently disabling constructive research on the literary-sociological lines projected by Escarpit: namely, scholarly ignorance about book trade and publishing history technicalities. This sets up, I shall suggest, a large and troubling hole at the centre of the subject, and there is little indication, at this stage, how or when the hole is to be filled. 1. See Raymond Williams, “Literature and Sociology,” Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays , pp. 11-30. John Sutherland is professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology. His books include Fiction and the Fiction Industry , Bestsellers , and Offensive Literature . He is currently completing an encyclopedia of Victorian fiction